Audacity Forum

Gale Andrews wrote:Yes thanks to Shaky too from me. I made a note of that site , and it's noteworthy that they were supplying updated drivers for certain legacy Creative products up to 2009 (much longer than Creative were).

However not all Creative products were covered - for example X-Fi.


Gale

Yes, that's a pity, I've noticed that too. Although, my X-Fi stream audio seems to be special in that it is rather Audigy based and has an older chip set than the other X-Fis. However, I don't fiddle around with my drivers lest I am out of sound...

tucboy85 wrote:Thanks to Shaky for the lead on the kX project!

Pleased to be of help.

I recall maybe sometime 2007/8 trying to reinstall an XP machine with my old soundblaster card; constant blue screen of death seemingly no matter what Creative driver pack I installed. A disgraceful level of support.

And frankly surprising since when I listen to recordings I made when the card was in my main PC I am always struck by how good it sounds. I now use an Asus Xonar D2 soundcard that on paper has far superior specifications but I subjectively prefer my Soundblaster recordings, and I wonder whether theoretically lower sound quality imparts a quality analogous to the saturation effects known from certain analogue equipment like EQs?? That is almost certainly superstitious nonsense, however.

certain analogue equipment like EQs

Or linear tape -- or Rupert-Neve sound consoles.

It may not be just you. Super wide-band audio channels also make distortion more apparent. Distortion products always go up (harmonic distortion) and full 20KHz bandwidth audio channels can carry a lot of distortion.

I went to a demonstration of sound quality and was treated to different problems that sound systems can have. The operator played a most pleasant sound track and then told us it was recorded by very good quality older equipment none of which was capable of anything over 15 KHz.

Koz